Pages

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

You've got to hand it to Muslim Brotherhood front groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations – known as CAIR.

It is conducting, with brilliant success, a media strategy in which it is portrayed as a Muslim civil-rights group earnestly fighting against religious bigotry in the best tradition of the United States of America, while it systematically attacks the First Amendment's protections of freedom of speech and religious liberty.

And the U.S. media – practically all of it – from CNN to Fox to the New York Times and ABC, NBC and CBS, offer CAIR the red carpet treatment to make its subversive case to the nation and the world.

Let me give you a few compelling and recent examples of the way this works.

This week CAIR called a news conference in Seattle to charge
that FBI agents are trained "to view mainstream Muslims with suspicion
and to view the faith of Islam itself as the source of terrorism and
extremism." The evidence? A document signed by a local FBI agent and
distributed in a class stated in part: "A careful comparison of
Arab/Islamist propaganda and Nazi propaganda reveals the closeness of
these links. ... I would suggest that the current conflicts are a
continuation of Nazi policies carried out by Arabs. ..." If such a
charge were untrue, of course, CAIR might have a point. But there is
overwhelming evidence – in fact, historical proof – that those words are
100 percent accurate. In fact, I can tell you as an Arab-American who
published a well-documented book, "The Nazi Connection to Islamic Terrorism,"
on this very subject of the historical and contemporary links between
Adolf Hitler's Nazis and the modern Islamist ideology, that the
allegation is beyond question – if the facts are actually examined.

CAIR knows the American media has no stomach for the truth. And it
also knows the U.S. Justice Department under the leadership of Eric
Holder and, ultimately, Barack Obama, has no stomach for that kind of
truth either. The FBI is hardly antithetical to groups like CAIR, which
portray themselves, their membership, their officers and their
leadership as mainstream Americans. The FBI formerly used CAIR to
provide sensitivity training to agents regarding the Islamic community –
until it discovered the true nature of the organization. CAIR told
Muslim-American followers not to "snitch" on members of its community
when they suspected illegal activity. CAIR was named an unindicted
co-conspirator in the largest terrorism fundraising case in American
history. And more than a dozen employees, directors and officers of CAIR
have themselves been arrested, indicted or convicted of
terrorism-related charges since Sept. 11, 2001. In this case, not only
is CAIR attacking free speech, it is conducting a direct assault on
America's national security by attempting to force the nation's top law
enforcement organization from using actual facts to educate its agents.

National Public Radio and the New York Times
recently jumped all over the FBI for allowing its agents to be briefed
by experts in Islamic terrorism who weren't properly vetted – meaning
they weren't selected by Muslim Brotherhood front groups like CAIR. Both
of the reports were derivative of and made reference to an article in Wired.com prepared by Spencer Ackerman,
famous not so much for what he has published but what he wrote that he
never intended to be published. At the time, working for the George
Soros-backed Washington Independent, he famously called upon his
colleagues to deflect attention from Barack Obama's relationship with
Rev. Jeremiah Wright by changing the subject. When anyone criticized
Obama, they needed to be labeled as "racist," he explained. Even more
telling was this Ackerman statement: "Find a right winger's (sic) and
smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding
mass and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it
needs to live in a constant state of fear." Ackerman is not exactly a
seeker of the truth – and that's exactly what the experts he attacked
were trying to share with FBI agents. CAIR is there to assist media
people like Ackerman prepare their "stories" – and there again to spread
them to more mainstream outlets, and all the while cheering them on
from the sidelines and providing corroborating quotes.

CAIR is supporting a Florida school district and a
judge's decision restricting the free speech rights of students who wore
T-shirts that said "Islam is of the Devil" to school. One can certainly
argue whether wearing such T-shirts is a good idea or not, but one can
scarcely argue that they are not within the scope of First Amendment
protection. Even the judge who upheld the school system's decision
wouldn't make that case. Instead, he ruled that the First Amendment
rights of students at school are not as broad as they might be elsewhere
– which, of course, means this is one more nail in the coffin of
students' First Amendment rights. Please tell me how we teach students
about the value and purpose of the First Amendment while restricting
their exercise of it.

"If anyone criticizes the ideology of Islam, jihad and Shariah,
CAIR spins it to an attack on the Muslim people, confusing the American
people between criticism of an ideology and being a racist against a
whole group of people," Darwish told WND. "I hope that the American
people are more intelligent than to fall for this kind of childish
spin."

CAIR also hopes to prevent Pamela Geller, author of the new book "Stop the Islamization Of America," and Robert Spencer, author of "Stealth Jihad," from speaking on college and university campuses. Is that activity what one should expect from a "civil-rights organization"?

Then there's the little matter of Iranian Pastor Youcef
Nadarkani's death sentence for "apostasy" in Iran. You might think an
American "Muslim civil-rights group" might take special interest in a
Christian facing the gallows in Iran over a matter of his faith. After
all, it wasn't more than a week ago that representatives of CAIR were
basking in accolades over their role in helping to free two American
hikers abducted by the Islamic regime. To date, CAIR has not issued a
single word of concern or condemnation over the death sentence for a
Muslim convert to Christianity. Of course, if you believe in the Muslim
tenet that converts from the faith are deserving of the death penalty, I
suppose silence is in CAIR's best interests as an undercover operative
inside the U.S. attacking the Constitution and promoting Shariah law.

I have had my own experiences with CAIR over the years. As an
Arab-American whose Christian grandparents fled the Middle East because
of Islamic domination, I had many opportunities to debate CAIR
representatives on television and radio. In every case, CAIR lobbied
hard for an opponent who was less able. When Dr. Laura Schlessinger
announced me as a guest on her old syndicated radio program to discuss
the Middle East, CAIR flooded the network with faxes of howling protest.
As a result of that kind of campaign, I have not been invited on any show to debate CAIR for at least five years.

It's easier for the FBI, especially given the political realities
of the day, to pretend CAIR is simply what it claims to be – a Muslim
civil-rights organization.

It's easier for all Americans to avoid getting involved in the
fight to preserve America's heritage of constitutionally guaranteed free
speech by simply pretending CAIR is what it claims to be – a Muslim
civil-rights organization.

It's messy to stand up to thugs like this. It's risky to expose
people's terrorist connections and the threat they pose to national
security.

Suzanne Fields Two little girls I know, age 6, showed up the other day at a public pool in Washington for a swim. They were excited by the...

Why we publish...

"AS LONG AS I AM AN AMERICAN CITIZEN AND AMERICAN BLOOD RUNS IN THESE VEINS I SHALL HOLD MYSELF AT LIBERTY TO SPEAK, TO WRITE, AND TO PUBLISH WHATEVER I PLEASE ON ANY SUBJECT" ---- Elijah Parish Lovejoy (1802-1837)